Future Communities for a Changing World
In the last few years and especially with the advent of Covid-19 and the suffering caused on a global scale by it, we are belatedly becoming aware that the ideals our trusted educators taught us to accept are not altogether indisputable. Generations have lived out their lifespans believing in fallacies, fervent followers of systems that measure everything and everyone as economic units with the almighty profit as our God. In their ignorance, our parents passed on these reverent beliefs, and our education system rigidly reinforced them with the questionable end goal of producing a placid, obedient and grateful workforce. By entering wholeheartedly into the shiny pond of consumption, we would all make the world a better place and improve our lot in it, or so they tell us. Now we are all beginning to see the cracks running through the walls of this tower of fantasy. Infinite consumerism powered by the idyll of endless growth is not sustainable and takes us, the human species, down the road of eternal suffering. Rampant pollution, acidic oceans, species extinctions, changing weather patterns, growing soil infertility, forests destruction, melting glaciers and permafrost, methane release and carbon over-production, freshwater shortages and clean air degradation, advancing inequality and socio-political destabilisation — you name it, and it is happening. It sounds almost biblical. We are not the only…
